I ran into an interesting read in a blog post titled The Chief Knowledge Officer's Dilemma. It caught my attention based on the opening line which of course was aggregated in several places: "Let's face it: The whole "Knowledge Management" experiment was a failure." Wow. Strong words. So I had to take a look. And all in all some interesting points raised, but my read of it suggests that it falls far short of demonstrating exactly how it is that KM has supposedly been a failure. Not that I was hoping for that, but every once in awhile there has been a white paper or blog, etc., which declares that KM has failed and typically suggests that you move along (like driving slowly past a car wreck by the side of the roadway) and so you just have to take a look. But there is one key statement that I think makes for good discussion fodder here: "But I do know that knowledge management focuses on the symptoms, and not on solving the root cause." And here is where I believe that I must part ways with the whole premise that KM has somehow failed. It's not that the KM has failed, it's that the organizations that have attempted to implement it have failed. I mean, come on...someone walks into your office and decides that all that ceiling space is quite unused so they start mounting the keyboards and monitors on the ceiling. Get some taller chairs, safety belts and let's put the workers to the task and use all that wonderful space. Make sense? Of course not. And yet the same thing has happened over and over regarding KM implementation. Someone in the organization one day proclaims that they need to get onboard with the "knowledge management" thingie....and then the purchasing machine and the IT folks got together and started cobbling together some sort of KM "thingie" that ultimately failed to work. And you know what? Saw the same kind of thing happen with TQM and BPR. They aren't a failure, I truly believe that. The failure was in the many organizations that saw those tools as a short cut to an instant fix, and for their short cut of the methodologies taken with a wink and a nod here and there and a mention of "well, that's not how we're going to do it here." Another interesting quote from the above blog that refers to the supposed failure of KM: "Today, knowledge workers write once, and cut & paste often." Which sounds practical...however, one thing that we now know for certain is that on average a knowledge worker is likely some 50% of the time simply recreate the very document that they were looking for because of a failure to either find the document or to be able to access it. That's a 50% rework rate folks. Any project managers out there care to chime in about what that would do to your "burn rate" on ANY given project? I don't disagree with the above quote, but I do see a different issue -- I see organizations that never bothered to talk to their knowledge workers to determine what knowledge they needed to access and how. And I see an organization working on perfecting the next "smart search tool" (astounding given that most searches are two key words or less...exactly how much smarter can that search tool become given a two-word keyword search???). I believe that the actual issue is that there was a failure in the implementation of KM. Not in the failure of KM itself. How I know that to be the case is that when I talk to an organization that has determined KM to be a "failure" I am able to quickly identify that there was not a single "real" KM implementation strategy in place. Did they create a knowledge map? Nope. Did they do a knowledge audit? Did they have a KM strategic plan? Nope. Too expensive. Too difficult. Too time consuming. Can't determine future requirements. Not to mention that any of these would actually involve having to bring the actual knowledge workers into the discussions. And who knows where that might lead! I'd humbly suggest that if your organization is still having a discourse about whether it is possible to "manage the knowledge" or whether you should be spending time instead on "empowering knowledge workers"....that the likelihood is that there in fact is probably no KM strategy in place. KM strategy isn't about managing knowledge or even about empowering knowledge workers. I'm not suggesting that there will be none of either ongoing in the organization, but they are not a substitute for strategy (same with locating keyboards on the ceiling). A KM strategy is all about taking a good hard look at the organization's current and desired performance. Performance gap analysis. Conducting situation analysis (a related warning sign is that if your organization is still focused upon "SWOT" analysis rather than situational analysis, you're unlikely to have a KM strategy either). Deriving strategy, establishing the metrics to support that. And ensuring that the KM strategy is in place to support that. It's not the KM that was or is or will be the failure. It is the organization itself that failed. Failed to take a hard look at its performance, where it needed to be for the future. Heck, in many cases failure to even consider a future more than a budget cycle or two out into the future. And as a result of these failures, sure, bought lots of IT. And here we are now poised at the brink of "Web 2.0" with many addressing the need to implement these slick new tools that are here and are still coming. But without any change to the strategy development process there is likely to be a repeat performance...assuming that you get that far. After all, all the money put into the first generation of KM technology....wow, sure hate to abandon that right? Dr. Dan's Daily Dose: Successful KM implementation is all about having a successful KM strategy.